We’re seeing this stuff all over the media nowadays: anxiety, stress, panic attacks, and even trouble sleeping. This MSNBC article makes the case that we are a very nervous nation, with individuals often on the verge of one sort of attack or another. I found these paragraphs from the article to be intriguing:
So we evolved to have a very sensitive fight-or-flight response to get us out of the way when there was even a hint of a threat. Even in today’s world, that fight-or-flight response protects us, telling us to avoid the growling dog or jump out of the way of the car speeding our way.
Now that response can be sparked by stress from work and other problems of daily life. That doesn’t necessarily mean stress is bad.
“Stress is a natural motivator for people in the work force,” Snyderman said. “Stress is what helps us avoid trouble. But anxiety is what happens when it interferes with your normal workday. You’re afraid to leave the house. You have such rampant thoughts that you can’t get a project done. You’re lying in bed and you’re already worried about what’s going to happen the next day.”
In fact, we did not evolve to be in a state of fight-or-flight as much as we tend to be in modern life. Not all stress is bad, indeed, but much of the stress that folks experience in their lives is of the bad sort, and hence the outcome of anxiety and myriad health issues. The workplace, for many, offers up a constant dose of fight-or-flight, perpetually leaving us in an unnatural state of overwhelming stress, and sometimes, even fear.
The modern, white collar sweatshop job is perhaps the best example of a constant, high-stress environment with, quite often, too little pace time and/or reward. Our bodies stress responses are consistently being activated, and this causes the prolonged release of cortisol, which is not beneficial for overall health.
For so many, stress is a killer and/or a destroyer of body and health. Anxiety is one’s “signal” that something is going awry, and too often, we pay too little attention to those kind of signals. Instead, the medical profession has taken to identifying multiple stress “disorders,” and Big Pharma benefits greatly from the “official” recognition of these disorders as “mental illness.”
